10 ms·

New antibiotic kills off persistent infections

187 points by oyvindeh 13y ago

sgarlatm 13y ago
It's nice to know that despite all the alarmist articles about the end of antibiotics, good progress is being made. If this works, it could completely replace traditional antibiotics. In that case, I could see dozens of new drugs in this class developed by the antibiotic companies. This would be similar to the race to develop new antidepressants, HIV drugs, and erectile dysfunction drugs. Any drug you have to take over and over again is a huge draw for the pharmaceuticals.
- zabraxias 13y ago
  This is really fantastic news but I too am skeptical of the drug companies being interested in a cure as opposed to a repeatable treatment. As a side note the article seems very well written for non-medical folks like myself.
  - Fomite 13y ago
    This line of reasoning doesn't really apply to antibiotics - because you're likely to get another infection in your lifetime, and many people have infections at any given time, they're perfectly fine eradicating this one. Believe me, in the infectious disease space, drug companies tend to look for cures and prevention. For example, Merck and GSK spent staggering amounts of money on the HPV vaccine.
- giarc 13y ago
  This won't completely replace traditional antibiotics. As the article states this acts on Gram positive persister cells (a very specific group). The coming storm is from Gram negative bacteria such as Klebsiella, Actinetobacter and Pseudomonas. There is actually very little activity occurring in the field of antibiotic drug discovery and you identified the issue; no money in drugs that someone takes for 14 days and stops. Pharmaceutical companies are driven by stockholders and therefore they want them developing drugs that someone takes for the rest of their life (anti-depressants). Much of the research for abx discovery comes from academia who struggle with budgets that are pennies compared to what Pfizer, GSK, Wyeth, Astra can afford.
  - im3w1l 13y ago
    The scary thing is what would happen if these bacteria fell into the hands of terrorist extremists. They could potentially create bio-weapons of mass destruction. Or imagine if some suicide cult decided that the time has come for the doomsday of reckoning. Al-Qaeda anthrax letters are nothing compared to this. It could also be used to threaten mutually assured destruction in asymmetric warfare. Iran could probably develop it more easily and stealthily than their (not very) secret nuke program. Developing countermeasure to this is a matter of national security. Insha'Allah people will come to their senses and please think of the children: We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children before it is too late. -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE----- . jA0EAwMCRocgNS5lXxmuyT+0aXL2u7pKyJ0+BNTpPRy33dvnVrD4SVfqcF+oTDUx vLOi4p3oM6sJn80NnTUCGjqlpEPuekIIRXWAjOtq+P4= =+4PK -----END PGP MESSAGE-----
  - JunkDNA 13y ago
    You're right that it's about profits when pharma is involved, but you are wrong about the reason (otherwise vaccines would not exist). I can tell you from firsthand experience that the length of time someone is on a drug makes almost no difference in where research priorities are. The primary issue with antibiotics is that since the late 1990's, if you succeed, and you develop the best antibiotic the world has ever seen, the FDA will require it to be a "drug of last resort". It will therefore sit on the shelf and be guaranteed to not be prescribed very much during the life of its patent. Once enough time goes by, and other drugs come out if (and that's a big if) it is no longer a drug of last resort, it is likely off patent and therefore can be made in generic form for pennies by generic manufacturers. Regardless of what you think about patents, these incentives are completely misaligned with companies going all-in and taking a risk on new antibiotics.
    - maxerickson 13y ago
      Do you know if NIH uses any of their funding in a DARPA like manner?
      - JunkDNA 13y ago
        They do this to a certain extent, but the problem here is that the "R" part of "R&D" is not really at issue. While there's a lot of focus in the popular press on "finding" new antibiotics, that part can be addressed by basic research grants. I don't believe we're wanting for proof of concept kinds of things. Unlike with engineering, where once you've got a proof of concept, you can refine and iterate to make it production quality, biology is completely arbitrary. The issue comes with the "D" part of R&D. That is the expensive part with drugs because you start having to do very tightly controlled animal model studies progressing further into clinical trials with humans. The popular notion that you "discover" a drug is not how things work in reality. Often you discover a whole raft of closely related chemical entities that appear to do what you think they do. You tweak based on further studies in order to improve efficacy and safety. But the system is sort of nondeterministic in the sense that even altering the structure slightly often has knock-on effects you can't predict. Assuming you get something decent, that's what gets made into the an actual medicine. There's a whole branch of applied chemistry that specializes in this called medicinal chemistry. In many cases, you'll read about some promising new antibiotic that has been discovered in an academic lab, but once the chemists take a look at it, you realize there's no way to make a drug out of it. The reasons can be any or all of: the therapeutic dose would be too high, it blows out the liver, it can't be made into pill, the compound is unstable and can't have a good shelf life, it can't be taken orally, etc... Working out all those kinds of problems has always been the realm of pharmas and biotech startups. Academics aren't interested in that stuff because it's not basic research, it's highly applied and is mostly trial and error based on decades of doing this kind of work. At a macro-level, this is fundamentally what ails the entire pharma sector right now. The development part of making drugs is so expensive and such a complete and utter crap-shoot, that few new drugs of any sort are actually being produced. The last decade has been one of prolonged decline in the industry in terms of truly new drugs and there is no obvious mechanism available to us to make it less so.
spindritf 13y ago
> it only works the bacteria known as gram-positives, which includes problematic bugs like Staphylococcus I have had one of those for almost a decade now. > He hasn’t tested it in humans yet How long is the road ahead before it becomes available to regular patients? Should I get my hopes up?
- unclebucknasty 13y ago
  >I have had one of those for almost a decade now. Sinuses?
  - spindritf 13y ago
    No, just an ear infection. More annoying than anything. Although it does supposedly carry some risk of hearing loss should it come back hard.
    - unclebucknasty 13y ago
      Sorry to hear that. Been dealing with similar of the sinuses myself for about the same period of time. Definitely no fun, but this does sound promising. Good luck to us all.
      - kghose 13y ago
        Have you tried nose rinses? My ENT prescribed those and that helped.
        unclebucknasty 13y ago
        Have I? LOL. Seriously, I've tried pretty much everything (medical and alternative). And, actually, the saline rinses helped some, but didn't prevent the infection from re-emerging or clear it once it did. Then, someone mentioned adding fresh garlic (steeped, like tea) to the saline rinse. Sounded nuts so I didn't bother for a year. Finally got fed up enough to try it and amazed to find that it works better than any medical treatment thus far. I'd recommend it, but it's a pain to prepare, smells, and is not a cure (i.e. you have to continue to do it regularly to keep the infection at bay). That's why something like the subject post is hopeful.
throwaway0094 13y ago
> New antibiotic kills off persistent infections Now available in hand-soap.
- angersock 13y ago
  oh god damn it >:(
- Brakenshire 13y ago
  What's that? Inject the hand-soap directly into my veins?
AaronFriel 13y ago
The most understated portion of the article is that there is a method discovered that can kill biofilms. The discovery of new antibiotics and delivery techniques leaves me less optimistic for long-term change in the availability of life-saving antibiotics. I suspect bacteria can, and will, evolve around almost any mitigating technique we develop. Yet I'm optimistic, because tools that crack biofilms are a new are of development and promise hope for exploring new attacks on bacteria. Current methods of biofilm dispersal are application of strong acids and bases or an autoclave. You can't treat a hospital room with an autoclave, and comprehensive treatment of a room with very strongly ionizing agents has its own risks. There are other, experimental methods, but all are worth examining. I hope research like this continues.
- _Adam 13y ago
  >I suspect bacteria can, and will, evolve around almost any mitigating technique we develop. That's a baseless suspicion. Bacteria are ultimately bound by physical laws, and while they've proven resilient, there's no reason to suggest we will be unable to develop the means to annihilate them at will. Humans are creative - bacteria just evolve fast. I agree about the importance of the biofilm claim, but what they don't explain is how they actually achieve this. Their method of disabling that particular protein doesn't directly address the problem of the biofilms having a less-permeable extracellular matrix.
  - gnaffle 13y ago
    What I'm more concerned about is that new, creative innovations (nanobots etc) can have more sinister uses and might ultimately prove a bigger risk than our current bacteria.
    - sard420 13y ago
      My guess nano-bots that save, will come after we've made them kill.
  - AaronFriel 13y ago
    The problem of killing bacteria, as I see it, will increasingly become something akin to the demarcation problem of philosophy. Why would it not be? It is natural that the optimal situation for pathogenic bacteria to be in is one in which they are indistinguishable from necessary cells. It may take an extraordinarily long time, but until we are able to completely eradicate a pathogenic bacteria from the earth, we will remain in that arms race. Humans are creative at killing bacteria, though it's already not difficult to "annihilate them at will". It's much harder to annihilate only the ones we don't like, only the ones that harm us, and only the ones that pose the greatest risk.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
mjn 13y ago
Some background, based on quick research, not personal knowledge, so please correct if anything's wrong: This class of antibiotics, ADEP, was discovered as a naturally produced substance isolated from the bacteria Streptomyces hawaiiensis in 1985 (Streptomyces has been a fertile source of naturally occurring antibiotics). After some promising results, there was work on synthetically synthesizing it and producing "optimized" synthetic variants. ADEP4 is one of those, and was reported in a paper published in 2005. There's a short 1-page summary of that work in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 4: 957. See page 19 of this PDF, article "Peptide power": http://journals2005.pasteur.ac.ir/NR/4%2812%29.pdf http://journals2005.pasteur.ac.ir/NR/4%2812%29.pdf There's a lot of work trying to understand its mechanism, e.g. here's one open-access paper that also has some background: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2955292/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2955292/ Here's the paper discussed in the linked article, unfortunately paywalled, but with an abstract available that's actually a good summary: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature12790.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...
- Brakenshire 13y ago
  > isolated from the bacteria Streptomyces hawaiiensis in 1985 ... ADEP4 is one of those, and was reported in a paper published in 2005 ... [potential trials in coming years] Gives an idea of the sort of development timescale we're talking about. It's almost 30 years from isolation to this point. Clinical trials would take another 10-15 years. So, if all goes well, that's 40 years from the initial discovery until a doctor starts making up prescriptions.
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  Excellent summary. I look forward to when our knowledge of cell biology is so complete that there isn't any time wasted on 'trying to understand its mechanism' rather we can explain such mechanism from first principles and know with certainly not only how it works, but how to adjust it to work most effectively to our benefit.
- girvo 13y ago
  It's a peptide? Neat!
atmosx 13y ago
That's very good news actually. If first stage trials are successful might be marketed sooner than expected. However, I didn't read the paper, so I can't comment on the mechanism of action which the mos interesting part of an drug. Bacteria might become resistant if this procedure becomes overused (as usual) and it would be a shame.
driverdan 13y ago
Very interesting research but it doesn't mention any negatives of ADEP4. What kind of effects could it have on the human body?
- Fomite 13y ago
  Many antibiotics are fairly nasty drugs - they're associated with kidney failure and other negative outcomes, especially for long term treatment. But it's hard to know for sure until things progress to the point where we are doing toxicity studies. Which you don't bother with until you know the thing can work in the first place.
davidjnelson 13y ago
I wonder if this approach will eventually be useful in eliminating Chronic Lyme Disease.
- Fomite 13y ago
  Doubtful, as there's little to no scientific evidence that Chronic Lyme Disease is actually a bacterial infection.
  - brandoncarl 13y ago
    That's actually a bit of a dated response: See recent study on Rhesus monkeys: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0029914 http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna... The "no bacteria" perspective is usually based off of IDSA guidelines. Unfortunately, they've been successfully litigated against for providing incorrect information that appear to be linked to financial interests: "My office uncovered undisclosed financial interests held by several of the most powerful IDSA panelists. The IDSA's guideline panel improperly ignored or minimized consideration of alternative medical opinion and evidence regarding chronic Lyme disease, potentially raising serious questions about whether the recommendations reflected all relevant science." http://www.ct.gov/ag/cwp/view.asp?a=2795&q=414284 http://www.ct.gov/ag/cwp/view.asp?a=2795&q=414284 Good summary of Lyme: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3636972/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3636972/ Needless to say, we've got a lot of people we're telling that they are not sick when symptomatically they appear to be.
    - Fomite 13y ago
      Your "Good summary" is in a journal that's pretty far from what I'd call reputable. The PLOS One article on Rhesus monkeys isn't terribly definitive either - it's a big step between persisting in a host and capable of producing disease without manifesting any laboratory detectable presence. To jump from "This might be a cause" to "Lets treat people with long term courses of antibiotics, which have known and often severe side effects" is a pretty serious leap in logic. And I know very few clinicians who would tell someone who believes they're suffering from "Chronic Lyme" that they're not sick. Just that they're not sick in this particular way. Non-specific, widespread inflammatory disease is something the medical community is still struggling to figure out. But antibiotics are fairly nasty drugs for "We have no way of diagnosing this, fleeting evidence for a causal link, and no population-level studies."
scottrudy 13y ago
can it be tested on Google+?
jes5199 13y ago
Reading about new treatments gives me a kind of anxiety: drug trials are so slow and the funding models are so removed from the actual human life-saving potential, that I just am filled with fear that this stuff will get mired in bureaucracy or otherwise defunded rather than getting FDA approved. I dread the idea that someone I know to get sick and die because we're so ploddingly slow at doing these trials. For example: "DRACO" antivirals from MIT, were developed in 2011, and according to mouse model tests and tests on cultured human cells, is safe and effective against influenza and rhinovirus and everything else they threw at it (see http://mackinstitute.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Rider-Todd_PANACEA-Broad-Spectrum-Antiviral-Therapeutics.pdf http://mackinstitute.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/20... for details), and yet it could be a decade before we even try to answer questions like "wait, does this cure HIV? It sounds like it might actually cure HIV"
- Fomite 13y ago
  The funding models actually aren't removed from the actual human life-saving potential. The NIH has been pushing translational research pretty heavily, and if anything there's been a fair amount of pressure on the basic science types to tie their research to something, anything that will manifest in Saving Lives. Beyond that, it absolutely should take drugs many years to come to market. Research is hard. Research on human beings is very hard. You can't just take shots in the dark and hope something sticks - you have to understand how, and how well, something works. Even for the established antivirals we do have for HIV, we're still trying to figure out who to give them to and when.
Houshalter 13y ago
The bacteria evolving to go dormant reminds me scale insects that damaged citrus fruits. The farmers put a giant tent over every tree and gassed them. This worked at first, but after a few years the scale insects got resistant. Whenever startled, they would sit perfectly still and hold their breath for half an hour.
ffrryuu 13y ago
But does it kill the host as well?
shawn-furyan 13y ago
This is an awful headline change. National Geographic's title (Killing Sleeper Cells and Superbugs with Assassin Janitors) wasn't very descriptive, but at least it didn't leave room for a headline browser to take away the false conclusion that the CDC declared public health crisis of antibiotic resistance is near resolution. According to the article, this new antibiotic has only been tested on mice and rats. These sort of preliminary results go bust all the time, and so I think that in this case, it's irresponsible to fail to indicate that these are preliminary studies and that the effect hasn't been demonstrated in humans. This could have been achieved by leaving the title the same, or by changing it to "New antibiotic kills off persistent infections in rats".
analog31 13y ago
If this is a novel antibiotic with any therapeutic potential, please let's outlaw feeding it to cattle by the ton.
- GoodIntentions 13y ago
  Pretty much exactly what I was going to post. Prophylactic use of antibiotics in hogs/whatever is stupidity in a class of its' own, selectively breeding organisms on an industrial scale for resistance to the drugs we might want to use to keep us alive.

187 points by oyvindeh 13y ago

It's nice to know that despite all the alarmist articles about the end of antibiotics, good progress is being made. If this works, it could completely replace traditional antibiotics. In that case, I could see dozens of new drugs in this class developed by the antibiotic companies. This would be similar to the race to develop new antidepressants, HIV drugs, and erectile dysfunction drugs. Any drug you have to take over and over again is a huge draw for the pharmaceuticals.

zabraxias 13y ago
This is really fantastic news but I too am skeptical of the drug companies being interested in a cure as opposed to a repeatable treatment. As a side note the article seems very well written for non-medical folks like myself.
- Fomite 13y ago
  This line of reasoning doesn't really apply to antibiotics - because you're likely to get another infection in your lifetime, and many people have infections at any given time, they're perfectly fine eradicating this one. Believe me, in the infectious disease space, drug companies tend to look for cures and prevention. For example, Merck and GSK spent staggering amounts of money on the HPV vaccine.
giarc 13y ago
This won't completely replace traditional antibiotics. As the article states this acts on Gram positive persister cells (a very specific group). The coming storm is from Gram negative bacteria such as Klebsiella, Actinetobacter and Pseudomonas. There is actually very little activity occurring in the field of antibiotic drug discovery and you identified the issue; no money in drugs that someone takes for 14 days and stops. Pharmaceutical companies are driven by stockholders and therefore they want them developing drugs that someone takes for the rest of their life (anti-depressants). Much of the research for abx discovery comes from academia who struggle with budgets that are pennies compared to what Pfizer, GSK, Wyeth, Astra can afford.
- im3w1l 13y ago
  The scary thing is what would happen if these bacteria fell into the hands of terrorist extremists. They could potentially create bio-weapons of mass destruction. Or imagine if some suicide cult decided that the time has come for the doomsday of reckoning. Al-Qaeda anthrax letters are nothing compared to this. It could also be used to threaten mutually assured destruction in asymmetric warfare. Iran could probably develop it more easily and stealthily than their (not very) secret nuke program. Developing countermeasure to this is a matter of national security. Insha'Allah people will come to their senses and please think of the children: We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children before it is too late. -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE----- . jA0EAwMCRocgNS5lXxmuyT+0aXL2u7pKyJ0+BNTpPRy33dvnVrD4SVfqcF+oTDUx vLOi4p3oM6sJn80NnTUCGjqlpEPuekIIRXWAjOtq+P4= =+4PK -----END PGP MESSAGE-----
- JunkDNA 13y ago
  You're right that it's about profits when pharma is involved, but you are wrong about the reason (otherwise vaccines would not exist). I can tell you from firsthand experience that the length of time someone is on a drug makes almost no difference in where research priorities are. The primary issue with antibiotics is that since the late 1990's, if you succeed, and you develop the best antibiotic the world has ever seen, the FDA will require it to be a "drug of last resort". It will therefore sit on the shelf and be guaranteed to not be prescribed very much during the life of its patent. Once enough time goes by, and other drugs come out if (and that's a big if) it is no longer a drug of last resort, it is likely off patent and therefore can be made in generic form for pennies by generic manufacturers. Regardless of what you think about patents, these incentives are completely misaligned with companies going all-in and taking a risk on new antibiotics.
  - maxerickson 13y ago
    Do you know if NIH uses any of their funding in a DARPA like manner?
    - JunkDNA 13y ago
      They do this to a certain extent, but the problem here is that the "R" part of "R&D" is not really at issue. While there's a lot of focus in the popular press on "finding" new antibiotics, that part can be addressed by basic research grants. I don't believe we're wanting for proof of concept kinds of things. Unlike with engineering, where once you've got a proof of concept, you can refine and iterate to make it production quality, biology is completely arbitrary. The issue comes with the "D" part of R&D. That is the expensive part with drugs because you start having to do very tightly controlled animal model studies progressing further into clinical trials with humans. The popular notion that you "discover" a drug is not how things work in reality. Often you discover a whole raft of closely related chemical entities that appear to do what you think they do. You tweak based on further studies in order to improve efficacy and safety. But the system is sort of nondeterministic in the sense that even altering the structure slightly often has knock-on effects you can't predict. Assuming you get something decent, that's what gets made into the an actual medicine. There's a whole branch of applied chemistry that specializes in this called medicinal chemistry. In many cases, you'll read about some promising new antibiotic that has been discovered in an academic lab, but once the chemists take a look at it, you realize there's no way to make a drug out of it. The reasons can be any or all of: the therapeutic dose would be too high, it blows out the liver, it can't be made into pill, the compound is unstable and can't have a good shelf life, it can't be taken orally, etc... Working out all those kinds of problems has always been the realm of pharmas and biotech startups. Academics aren't interested in that stuff because it's not basic research, it's highly applied and is mostly trial and error based on decades of doing this kind of work. At a macro-level, this is fundamentally what ails the entire pharma sector right now. The development part of making drugs is so expensive and such a complete and utter crap-shoot, that few new drugs of any sort are actually being produced. The last decade has been one of prolonged decline in the industry in terms of truly new drugs and there is no obvious mechanism available to us to make it less so.

spindritf 13y ago

> it only works the bacteria known as gram-positives, which includes problematic bugs like Staphylococcus I have had one of those for almost a decade now. > He hasn’t tested it in humans yet How long is the road ahead before it becomes available to regular patients? Should I get my hopes up?

unclebucknasty 13y ago
>I have had one of those for almost a decade now. Sinuses?
- spindritf 13y ago
  No, just an ear infection. More annoying than anything. Although it does supposedly carry some risk of hearing loss should it come back hard.
  - unclebucknasty 13y ago
    Sorry to hear that. Been dealing with similar of the sinuses myself for about the same period of time. Definitely no fun, but this does sound promising. Good luck to us all.
    - kghose 13y ago
      Have you tried nose rinses? My ENT prescribed those and that helped.
      - unclebucknasty 13y ago
        Have I? LOL. Seriously, I've tried pretty much everything (medical and alternative). And, actually, the saline rinses helped some, but didn't prevent the infection from re-emerging or clear it once it did. Then, someone mentioned adding fresh garlic (steeped, like tea) to the saline rinse. Sounded nuts so I didn't bother for a year. Finally got fed up enough to try it and amazed to find that it works better than any medical treatment thus far. I'd recommend it, but it's a pain to prepare, smells, and is not a cure (i.e. you have to continue to do it regularly to keep the infection at bay). That's why something like the subject post is hopeful.

throwaway0094 13y ago

> New antibiotic kills off persistent infections Now available in hand-soap.

angersock 13y ago
oh god damn it >:(
Brakenshire 13y ago
What's that? Inject the hand-soap directly into my veins?

AaronFriel 13y ago

The most understated portion of the article is that there is a method discovered that can kill biofilms. The discovery of new antibiotics and delivery techniques leaves me less optimistic for long-term change in the availability of life-saving antibiotics. I suspect bacteria can, and will, evolve around almost any mitigating technique we develop. Yet I'm optimistic, because tools that crack biofilms are a new are of development and promise hope for exploring new attacks on bacteria. Current methods of biofilm dispersal are application of strong acids and bases or an autoclave. You can't treat a hospital room with an autoclave, and comprehensive treatment of a room with very strongly ionizing agents has its own risks. There are other, experimental methods, but all are worth examining. I hope research like this continues.

_Adam 13y ago
>I suspect bacteria can, and will, evolve around almost any mitigating technique we develop. That's a baseless suspicion. Bacteria are ultimately bound by physical laws, and while they've proven resilient, there's no reason to suggest we will be unable to develop the means to annihilate them at will. Humans are creative - bacteria just evolve fast. I agree about the importance of the biofilm claim, but what they don't explain is how they actually achieve this. Their method of disabling that particular protein doesn't directly address the problem of the biofilms having a less-permeable extracellular matrix.
- gnaffle 13y ago
  What I'm more concerned about is that new, creative innovations (nanobots etc) can have more sinister uses and might ultimately prove a bigger risk than our current bacteria.
  - sard420 13y ago
    My guess nano-bots that save, will come after we've made them kill.
- AaronFriel 13y ago
  The problem of killing bacteria, as I see it, will increasingly become something akin to the demarcation problem of philosophy. Why would it not be? It is natural that the optimal situation for pathogenic bacteria to be in is one in which they are indistinguishable from necessary cells. It may take an extraordinarily long time, but until we are able to completely eradicate a pathogenic bacteria from the earth, we will remain in that arms race. Humans are creative at killing bacteria, though it's already not difficult to "annihilate them at will". It's much harder to annihilate only the ones we don't like, only the ones that harm us, and only the ones that pose the greatest risk.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

mjn 13y ago

Some background, based on quick research, not personal knowledge, so please correct if anything's wrong: This class of antibiotics, ADEP, was discovered as a naturally produced substance isolated from the bacteria Streptomyces hawaiiensis in 1985 (Streptomyces has been a fertile source of naturally occurring antibiotics). After some promising results, there was work on synthetically synthesizing it and producing "optimized" synthetic variants. ADEP4 is one of those, and was reported in a paper published in 2005. There's a short 1-page summary of that work in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 4: 957. See page 19 of this PDF, article "Peptide power": http://journals2005.pasteur.ac.ir/NR/4%2812%29.pdf http://journals2005.pasteur.ac.ir/NR/4%2812%29.pdf There's a lot of work trying to understand its mechanism, e.g. here's one open-access paper that also has some background: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2955292/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2955292/ Here's the paper discussed in the linked article, unfortunately paywalled, but with an abstract available that's actually a good summary: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature12790.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...

Brakenshire 13y ago
> isolated from the bacteria Streptomyces hawaiiensis in 1985 ... ADEP4 is one of those, and was reported in a paper published in 2005 ... [potential trials in coming years] Gives an idea of the sort of development timescale we're talking about. It's almost 30 years from isolation to this point. Clinical trials would take another 10-15 years. So, if all goes well, that's 40 years from the initial discovery until a doctor starts making up prescriptions.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
Excellent summary. I look forward to when our knowledge of cell biology is so complete that there isn't any time wasted on 'trying to understand its mechanism' rather we can explain such mechanism from first principles and know with certainly not only how it works, but how to adjust it to work most effectively to our benefit.
girvo 13y ago
It's a peptide? Neat!

atmosx 13y ago

That's very good news actually. If first stage trials are successful might be marketed sooner than expected. However, I didn't read the paper, so I can't comment on the mechanism of action which the mos interesting part of an drug. Bacteria might become resistant if this procedure becomes overused (as usual) and it would be a shame.

driverdan 13y ago

Very interesting research but it doesn't mention any negatives of ADEP4. What kind of effects could it have on the human body?

Fomite 13y ago
Many antibiotics are fairly nasty drugs - they're associated with kidney failure and other negative outcomes, especially for long term treatment. But it's hard to know for sure until things progress to the point where we are doing toxicity studies. Which you don't bother with until you know the thing can work in the first place.

davidjnelson 13y ago

I wonder if this approach will eventually be useful in eliminating Chronic Lyme Disease.

Fomite 13y ago
Doubtful, as there's little to no scientific evidence that Chronic Lyme Disease is actually a bacterial infection.
- brandoncarl 13y ago
  That's actually a bit of a dated response: See recent study on Rhesus monkeys: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0029914 http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna... The "no bacteria" perspective is usually based off of IDSA guidelines. Unfortunately, they've been successfully litigated against for providing incorrect information that appear to be linked to financial interests: "My office uncovered undisclosed financial interests held by several of the most powerful IDSA panelists. The IDSA's guideline panel improperly ignored or minimized consideration of alternative medical opinion and evidence regarding chronic Lyme disease, potentially raising serious questions about whether the recommendations reflected all relevant science." http://www.ct.gov/ag/cwp/view.asp?a=2795&q=414284 http://www.ct.gov/ag/cwp/view.asp?a=2795&q=414284 Good summary of Lyme: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3636972/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3636972/ Needless to say, we've got a lot of people we're telling that they are not sick when symptomatically they appear to be.
  - Fomite 13y ago
    Your "Good summary" is in a journal that's pretty far from what I'd call reputable. The PLOS One article on Rhesus monkeys isn't terribly definitive either - it's a big step between persisting in a host and capable of producing disease without manifesting any laboratory detectable presence. To jump from "This might be a cause" to "Lets treat people with long term courses of antibiotics, which have known and often severe side effects" is a pretty serious leap in logic. And I know very few clinicians who would tell someone who believes they're suffering from "Chronic Lyme" that they're not sick. Just that they're not sick in this particular way. Non-specific, widespread inflammatory disease is something the medical community is still struggling to figure out. But antibiotics are fairly nasty drugs for "We have no way of diagnosing this, fleeting evidence for a causal link, and no population-level studies."

scottrudy 13y ago

can it be tested on Google+?

jes5199 13y ago

Reading about new treatments gives me a kind of anxiety: drug trials are so slow and the funding models are so removed from the actual human life-saving potential, that I just am filled with fear that this stuff will get mired in bureaucracy or otherwise defunded rather than getting FDA approved. I dread the idea that someone I know to get sick and die because we're so ploddingly slow at doing these trials. For example: "DRACO" antivirals from MIT, were developed in 2011, and according to mouse model tests and tests on cultured human cells, is safe and effective against influenza and rhinovirus and everything else they threw at it (see http://mackinstitute.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Rider-Todd_PANACEA-Broad-Spectrum-Antiviral-Therapeutics.pdf http://mackinstitute.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/20... for details), and yet it could be a decade before we even try to answer questions like "wait, does this cure HIV? It sounds like it might actually cure HIV"

Fomite 13y ago
The funding models actually aren't removed from the actual human life-saving potential. The NIH has been pushing translational research pretty heavily, and if anything there's been a fair amount of pressure on the basic science types to tie their research to something, anything that will manifest in Saving Lives. Beyond that, it absolutely should take drugs many years to come to market. Research is hard. Research on human beings is very hard. You can't just take shots in the dark and hope something sticks - you have to understand how, and how well, something works. Even for the established antivirals we do have for HIV, we're still trying to figure out who to give them to and when.

Houshalter 13y ago

The bacteria evolving to go dormant reminds me scale insects that damaged citrus fruits. The farmers put a giant tent over every tree and gassed them. This worked at first, but after a few years the scale insects got resistant. Whenever startled, they would sit perfectly still and hold their breath for half an hour.

ffrryuu 13y ago

But does it kill the host as well?

shawn-furyan 13y ago

This is an awful headline change. National Geographic's title (Killing Sleeper Cells and Superbugs with Assassin Janitors) wasn't very descriptive, but at least it didn't leave room for a headline browser to take away the false conclusion that the CDC declared public health crisis of antibiotic resistance is near resolution. According to the article, this new antibiotic has only been tested on mice and rats. These sort of preliminary results go bust all the time, and so I think that in this case, it's irresponsible to fail to indicate that these are preliminary studies and that the effect hasn't been demonstrated in humans. This could have been achieved by leaving the title the same, or by changing it to "New antibiotic kills off persistent infections in rats".

analog31 13y ago

If this is a novel antibiotic with any therapeutic potential, please let's outlaw feeding it to cattle by the ton.

GoodIntentions 13y ago
Pretty much exactly what I was going to post. Prophylactic use of antibiotics in hogs/whatever is stupidity in a class of its' own, selectively breeding organisms on an industrial scale for resistance to the drugs we might want to use to keep us alive.